


The Meaning of Eternity

by Puffls



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Episode 63 spoilers, Existential Crisis, Mortality, POV Second Person, sorta - Freeform, this is all very speculative, what happens when we die??? fuck if i know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:29:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10974765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puffls/pseuds/Puffls
Summary: You cannot comprehend the meaning of eternity.You can comprehend that eternity is meaningless.





	The Meaning of Eternity

**Author's Note:**

> whats good i wrote this last night at 2 in the morning after i forgot how to fall asleep i have no idea how coherent this is but it feels decent enough  
> anyways i used to have these extreme existential/mortality based anxiety attacks that would happen every day for two months every year for five years and John??? just really reminded me of myself when i had to deal with that. the idea of mortality and eternity is some scary shit, yo.  
> some of the info in here may not be so accurate because i wrote it at 2 in the morning and is based on what little i remember from physics classes inbetween panic attacks ayoooooooo feel free to correct me

When you were a little boy, you used to ask people what would happen when you died.

Some people would launch on about the promises of a rich heaven for the good and layers upon layers of boiling hell for the wicked. They would talk about the good being taken to a place of complete sanctuary, where you are loved and cherished and held near and dear by everyone you ever knew. Where you are surrounded by everyone you loved and reunited with everyone you lost and you live on happily in celebration of times yet to come alongside friends and family. And for the wicked, endless agony and torture to make up for your sins. Eternal damnation, repenting for every misdeed from now until the end of time.

Some people would begin to talk about the cycle of things, about how life is not a linear path, about how the sun grows the grass the cows eat, about how you eat the cows. About how one day you will become the ground the grass grows from and how the cycle continues onwards. And just like physical bodies do, the spirit cycles as well in an endless chain of rebirth. It brings up discussion of past lives and what the future holds for such a boy, were he to drop dead at the mere mention of such.

Some would merely place a hand on your shoulder and offer you a sympathetic smile and say that you stop existing, simple as that. You die when you die, and all that lies ahead of you is oblivion. And the prospect is scary, but that’s simply how it is.

Some would simply say, “I don’t know,” and walk away, living a life unburdened by such thoughts.

You had heard countless theories and beliefs about what awaited you beyond the grave, and you all weighted them with careful consideration. All held truth of some sort. There is a reason for each theory and a reason why so many people hold value in these theories, so there must be some scrap of truth. Whether or not it is the absolute truth is yet to be seen, but it is a truth nonetheless. So you listen with open eyes and open ears and an open mind and you begin to put together the pieces that make up life beyond death.

At first, you took to the belief in the afterlife, as was what your parents and the majority of your small community believed in. The belief that you would buy your way to a better afterlife through good deeds and character. Your community was full of good people. You were raised by good people, surrounded by good people, hoped to follow in their footsteps in becoming a good person. 

You were a good person. Everyone told you so, after all. And if that were the case, then it must be true. 

But as you grew older, you became cynical after hearing someone referring to their sickly child as their “ticket into heaven” one too many times. You became cynical of human greed and watching people leer down from others from their high horses for having different beliefs, tired of watching the hatred and shunning of others because of who they were standing against their deities beliefs, disgusted at the acts of violence with religion as the excuse to carry them out, weary of the hate and the rage and the superiority complexes people built around their religions. You looked at it and turned away, deciding that you were a good person, but the promises of a golden age didn’t need to reward you for doing as you ought to. 

You didn’t need an afterlife, you decided. The present is more than enough to keep you occupied. So you pushed away thoughts of the future and you welcomed oblivion in the back of your mind.

 

You grew up being taught science and math and language arts. You took a liking to the languages and eventually made yourself a public speaker and that’s good and dandy. But the sciences. Science.

You know the world is older than the gods themselves. Older than magic and deities and emotion. There are theories about the universe having once concentrated itself up into a single point, wound up so tightly that it became a spring that burst, exploding into the vastness of space with all the flair and fanfare that the birth of the universe deserves. From there came the particles that made up the gasses that became the stars, the sun, the planets.

Everything, both biotic and abiotic, derives from the same materials that once made the stars. It’s poetic in a way, you think.

Everything except energy.

Energy follows different rules, as it is not something one can touch. Whether it can be seen is debatable. You can’t hear it or feel it. You simply know it is there because were it not, the universe would be still and all would cease to be. Energy is the root of it all, the root of the tension as the universe sprang into place, and the root of emotion and bonds among sentient beings.

Bonds are the root of magic.

Magic is something science has not yet been able to explain away, but at the end of the day, it is still energy.

And as everything moves, goes about its day, does exactly as it ought to, the cycle of energy flows throughout the system that is the world and the universe. And according to the second law of thermodynamics, there is always a net increase in the loss of energy leaving the system as it is transferred from form to form. Energy travels from warm bodies to cool bodies, leaving the previous source from the world and rejoining its origin in space. As entropy increases, energy drifts farther and farther apart until the entire universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium. The heat death of the universe.

The universe has a definite starting point, even if you went with a different theory on how it all came to be.

The universe has a definite stopping point as well.

Thinking of it all makes you smaller than you ever were before. Once upon a time, you fell in love with astronomy and the stars, looking for well known constellations, and making your own when preexisting patterns bored you. But now? You could barely spare the sky a glance. You aren’t ready to die, and although this end of the universe will happen so far from now that your name will be long forgotten and species long dead, you fear for the universe. You are small and insignificant and no matter what you accomplish, your feats will turn to dust that the winds scatter to the four corners of the world. Your name will be forgotten, no matter how many hear it. You are small and insignificant and the world will turn without you, just as it did before, and just as it will continue doing after. You are small and insignificant. The thought of oblivion makes itself known in your mind once more, and this time? It scares you. You want to exist. You want to  _ be _ . You want to keep on existing, and the thought that one day you will not be is terrifying.

It doesn’t matter that some part of you knows that you will not care about oblivion when the time comes, as you will not be aware of it. The part of you that is present, the part of you in the now is kicked into haywire and flooding your brain with the simple fact that you are terrified of your own mortality and the possibility of one day ceasing to be. 

So you turn back to your old religious upbringing, and you furiously bury yourself in texts in hopes of not sentencing yourself to damnation for turning your back on your old beliefs. You had been a speaker, you now become a preacher, and in your panic, you try to bury what scares you in an old life of dissatisfaction.

It doesn’t last. 

It never lasts, because now you are thinking of things you wish you hadn’t ventured into and it’s your biggest regret now because you realize that you are not only dissatisfied and afraid, but bored as well.

You die, you ascend or descend. You celebrate. You suffer.

But then what?

But then what.

You are dissatisfied with your religious life once more, not only with humanity’s greed, but with the pressure of eternity as well. The concept of heaven is a kind, warm one, but too much of a good thing goes sour. You know this. You know that you are not meant for sitting still and waiting. You need to move, you need to go, you need to seek and discover and learn like the universe depended on it. With the concept of heaven comes the concept of stagnation over a time that is longer than the universe’s lifespan, your own being barely a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second in the eyes of the world. With the concept of heaven comes the concept of “patience” and while you are a good person, you are not a patient man.

Time is of the essence.

You only have eternity to figure that out.

So you turn to the idea of reincarnation, the idea of rebirth. The cycle of all things. And it makes sense with you at first, as energy and matter cannot be created nor destroyed, but what does that have to say about souls? What does that have to say about that. The same starstuff that made up the universe at its birth has always been around and always will be around. You suppose it makes sense that you have always been around too, alongside everyone else.

If the universe is a sphere, then as all energy in the world drifts farther and farther apart, it will eventually reach a single point once more where it clusters together in the same matter as it did in the beginning. Everything will be drawn to the same point. It’s a cycle. From death comes rebirth. From the heat death of the universe will come the birth of a new one. But if the universe is constantly reborn as well, then how many times has the same universe been created? How many times have you been created? How many times have you sat here atop your bed on this very date and time and had an existential crisis? How many times have you done this, how many times have you made the same relationships, break the same relationships, make, break, recreate, rebirth. Again. Again. Again. You’ve already done everything you will do in the future and it’s driving you mad. What had once was, will be, has already happened, and will happen again.

For lack of a better phrase, your head hurts like a motherfucker.

 

No matter what you do, nothing you do matters, you realize. No matter what, the concept of eternity is impossible to conceive, as it has no starting point, no stopping point, and no measurement as a result of it. No matter what happens upon death, whatever happens will last eternity. It will last forever. Long after the joy of being reunited with long lost friends and family has worn off. Long after your name has been wiped from the world. Long after you have decomposed into the earth, soil having claimed hundreds of thousands of generations of biotic matter to nourish it. It goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on. 

You cannot comprehend the meaning of eternity.

You can comprehend that eternity is meaningless.

Nothing you or anyone else does will matter, nor will it ever matter, as all you do exists for barely a millionth of a millisecond of a breath in the scheme of the world. But what happens afterwards? What happens afterwards will last forever. It will last the lifespan of the universe. It will last another lifespan of the universe. And another. And another. And another. It’s waiting for the sunrise of tomorrow to never come, knowing it never will.

It eats away at you, leaving you lying down in bed and staring at the wall blankly, knowing that it doesn’t matter if you get up, it doesn’t matter if you stay there, it doesn’t matter if you died that very second and it doesn’t matter if you continued breathing a second more. You are small and insignificant and so is the rest of the world you know. There is nothing you can do to save anyone you know. There is nothing you can do to save anyone who is yet to come. There is nothing you can do to save the dreams of tomorrow from eternity, nothing you can do that will make any difference. And so you do nothing and the nothingness consumes you, turning your bones to lead that sink into your bed and it doesn’t matter if you get up. It doesn’t matter if you never did anything ever again, because chances are that you’ve already done nothing again. The paths of forever are already laid bare, and you will follow the same one you did before, just as you had, and will do.

And this discontentment? This dissatisfaction? This hopelessness and hollowness and emptiness and fear, this insignificance in the eye of the universe, of being worth less than bacteria despite all you, as a race, have accomplished? It doesn’t sit well with you. Nothing sits well with you. You don’t allow things to sit or settle. Inaction doesn’t suit you. But what can be done? There is nothing to be done. The only way to show you have ever existed is to bring about an end to something that is endless. Bring an end to something that is timeless. To become something larger than an unquantifiable concept. It brings about an idea. Which brings about a plan. Which brings about a desperation, a hope, for yourself, for all living beings. To prove that you, that anyone has ever existed. That anything ever had any meaning. That anything deserved to be remembered, that anything was worthy of anything better than eternity.

You understand life.

You understand life, and you would give anything to forget eternity.

You understand life, and life is a  _ joke _ . You understand that life is a burden, not a gift. It is a curse that binds all living beings from the moment they are created, it is a cruel joke built around struggle and sacrifice and struggling to prove that you even exist, only for all evidence of such a thing to be wiped away. It is a cycle of struggling, of pushing, of demoralization and desperation and hopelessness to simply  _ exist _ . And the universe does not care, as the universe has seen it before, and the universe will see it again when the universe reaches rebirth. Every meaningful conversation you have ever had is meaningless, as you have already spoken the words before in the same exact situation with the same exact people and will once more. Nothing has meaning. You are small and you are insignificant and the universe does not care for your struggle.

The universe is an endless, meaningless cycle that lasts all of eternity.

You want to have meaning. You want to make a mark. You want to prove that you existed, that everything existed, that your life had meaning. That your life, that the history of the world, deserves to be known, deserves to be preserved. That you deserve to make a definite “start” on history, and you deserve to have a definite “stop” as well.

The only way for anything to have meaning is for there to be an end.

So you begin your crusade to prove that you existed alongside everything else in your world, and you begin to climb your way into discovering the end of eternity.

**Author's Note:**

> please don't fuck the hunger he's having an existential crisis
> 
> my tumblr is whimsicmimic so shoot me an ask there if you wanna just. think about life and stuff. yeah.


End file.
